Simon Wheeler

Character Analysis

Though Simon Wheeler is bald and lazy, and seems simple, he may be cleverer than he looks. He’s certainly very aggressive in getting the narrator to listen to him. He uses tactics that sound like military maneuvers, such as "blockading" the narrator with a chair so that he can’t leave. But then there’s the question of why he’s so desperate to have someone listen to him. It has to get pretty lonely out there at the mining camp. Maybe he just wants to talk and doesn’t have any shame about it. Whatever the reason is, he throws the narrator completely off guard. Oh, and he also talks real funny and ungrammatical-like.